This could potentially be quite big for Ubuntu and Linux in general. Canonical and the Chinese government have announced a collaboration to build a version of Ubuntu specifically for the Chinese market, which will become the reference architecture for standard operating systems in the country.

It's actually one of the downsides to piracy. Why work on creating something when you can get it for free? Why work on Linux when you can get Windows for free?

That is also one of the reasons MS and other proprietary software vendors don't try too hard to stop piracy in poor countries. They know that if they do it will lead to a shift to opensource.

That is very very bad for them because a) they loose potential future customers b) opensource software becomes that much better *and* c) it leads to a large pool of experienced developers in poor countries who could compete with you in future.